title: Gender differences in adult word learning.
abstract: In prior work, women were found to outperform men on short-term verbal memory tasks. The goal of the present work was to examine whether gender differences on short-term memory tasks are tied to the involvement of long-term memory in the learning process. In Experiment 1, men and women were compared on their ability to remember phonologically-familiar novel words and phonologically-unfamiliar novel words. Learning of phonologically-familiar novel words (but not of phonologically-unfamiliar novel words) can be supported by long-term phonological knowledge. Results revealed that women outperformed men on phonologically-familiar novel words, but not on phonologically-unfamiliar novel words. In Experiment 2, we replicated Experiment 1 using a within-subjects design, and confirmed gender differences on phonologically-familiar, but not on phonologically-unfamiliar stimuli. These findings are interpreted to suggest that women are more likely than men to recruit native-language phonological knowledge during novel word-learning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI 53706, United States. kaushanskaya@wisc.edu
authors.forename: Margarita
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kaushanskaya
authors.forename: Viorica
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Marian
authors.forename: Jeewon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yoo
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary